In her poem “Driving into the Wreak,” Adrienne Rich uses a lot of passionate imagery to describe a lonely character’s adventure under the sea. The words and phrases she choses to use are so descriptive and compelling that it makes the reader feel as if he or she is taking the dive themselves. In this poem, the third stanza really stood out to me and it goes, “I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My fliippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin.” I like Rich’s choice of diction when she says “immerse” because the word is generally used when describing things that are submerged in liquid. The word in this line makes it feel as if the diver is swimming in air. Now the lines following, “the blue light the clear atoms of our human air,” brings a sense of comfort and familiarity of the human world. This is a stark contrast to the when the diver is about to go under water where it says, “I go down. My flippers crippled me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder.” The phrases “cripple me” and “crawl like an insect” really emphasizes the awkwardness of moving from land to sea. It is evident that the diver naturally is not comfortable in the ocean world as he or she is in the human world.
Having read “A Room of Ones Own” it is clear that Virginia Woolf was a great inspiration to Rich. It seems to me that a lot of Woolf’s anger towards sexual difference in power influenced Rich’s perspective on the issue and manifested her own sense of anger. In “A Room of Ones Own,” Woolf says, “but it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail.” The ideas of gender roles and women’s inferiority are reoccurring themes throughout Rich’s poems. Take “From and Old House in America” for example. This is a story about a man and wife and their struggles during the western movement in the early 19th century. In the last two lines of part 5 it says, “or between man and woman in this savagely fathered and unmothered world.” What this is referring to are the sins of men for driving their masculinity and the sins of women for being passive to this force.
The best way I can describe Rich’s poetic style is super organized. “Driving into the Wreak” is neatly broken into stanza that are between 8-18 lines long; “Cartographies of Silence” and “From an Old House in America” are written in lines of pairs; and “Twenty One Love Poem” are actually twenty one difference love poems from I-XXI. Reflecting on “From an Old House in America,” I think Rich wrote this poem in lines of pairs to symbolize the equality that should be between a man and woman. Another neat thing that Rich does in “Driving into the Wreak” is that she uses a colon in line “I am she: I am he.” I believe she uses this punctuation to illustrate that there isn’t a definitive separation between man and woman but rather a balanced coexistence between the two sexes.
I would hardly count “Twenty One Love Poems” as actual love poems; they’re more like sad poem if you ask me. Instead of there being descriptions of passion, infatuation, and yearning these poems are filled with loneliness, helplessness, and violence. The first three lines really surprised me as it states, “Wherever in this city, screens flicker with pornography, with science-fiction vampires, victimized hirelings bending to the lash.” I couldn’t help but wonder how does “pornography” and “science-fiction vampires” relate to love? I suppose Twilight might be able to answer that one…
A major shift in personas occurs in Rich’s “Driving into the Wreak,” where it says, “This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body We circle silently about the wreak we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he.” It is quite confusing to understand but it seems to me that the diver has somehow become a mermaid slash merman during his/her time underwater. If you notice, the diver starts describing himself not as “I” but as “we”. Going back to the idea of gender equality, the diver is a representation of how man and woman are one.
Hi Choi , I was also a little confused while reading the “Diving into the Wreck” at first also but what you quoted was the part for me that helped me interpret the poem better, “This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body we circle silently about the wreak we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he.”, I read that as the mermaid and the merman were both a representation of her feminine and masculine side that is why she said “I am she: I am he” . That stanza was my favorite one in the poem because after reading that it was easy for me to backtrack and interpret the whole poem not as literal tbecause mermaids and merman don’t actually exist. It was clear to me from that point that this poem was not an actual story about her going in an actual ocean, it had deeper meaning. From there I started to interpret the whole poem as symbolic, especially after reading that she was a lesbian on the blog post by Lee, so I think I may have solved what the poem is really about. I think the poem is not actually about finding treasure but it is about her diving into her consciousness which is a wreck to find out who she really is and that is what the treasure actually represents. Rich chose to “dive” into her consciousness because she didn’t find the answers she was looking for while trying to find herself reading “the book of myths” so she pretty much had to prepare herself to enter the brutal depths of her subconscious so metaphorically she puts on body armor and brought a knife with her to try to protect herself as much as possible from what she may find while entering her consciousness on her own and once she enters and becomes more knowledgeable of who she is she then realizes the didnt find the answers in the book of myths because the book holds no truth to someone like her thats why she says in the last stanza “a book of myths ,in which our names do not appear”.
wreak**
wreck** not wreak
Excellent post and comments. I enjoyed Diving into the Wreck for how Rich takes the reader on such a descriptive journey. She does bring a sense of comfort and familiarity with “the blue light the clear atoms of our human air.” I liked her presentation of the wreck itself. “The drowned face always staring towards the sun.” Something man made and permanent, in a place, although peaceful in her description, but put there by devastating circumstances.
In regards to your analysis of imagery in the poem—I couldn’t agree more! I submitted my take-home quiz and referenced the exact stanza which you referenced in this blog post. I too, find that the word “immerse” was a unique choice to include in the poem because of it’s context with the air. I find it interesting that you brought up two different “worlds”—an ocean world and human world. If this is the case, I wonder why the speaker might be so afraid or nervous about climbing down the ladder.
Also, in regards to “21 Love Poems,” I certainly agree that it is not a typical love poem that general readers would imagine a love poem to be. I have to admit that the first thing that came to my mind when I read the lines about pornography and science-fiction vampires was Twilight as well. I wonder why Rich took a similar approach to T.S. Elliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and how it may or may not tie in with the speaker’s sexuality.
Great analysis and ideas!